The Love Your Body Campaign is an integral part of the NOW Foundation. It is so very important for all women to Love Their Bodies. So many do not.
It has taken me a very long time to love my own body. God blessed me with a pretty decent model and early on I had some knowledge of how attractive I was to others. I didn't appreciate the strength in having that knowledge, in fact it irritated me. I thought it a shallow quality, one I was gifted and hadn't earned. I was more about substance and intelligence than physical attributes. I wanted to be taken seriously and not patronized. How easy that notion is to embrace when one is nice looking and suffers no poor images of ones own body.
I watch my stunningly beautiful daughter struggle with hers. She's twenty five years old, educated, professionally successful and drop dead gorgeous. She's reed thin, she has waist length silky blonde hair and a 100 watt smile. She's funny, she's sweet and she can tell you off in the blink of an eye. I can't believe I gave birth to this wondrous creature. It pains me to watch her displeasure with herself...but I know, like me, she will get to that place where she loves her body in time.
The place I am now.
I love my body. I know it better than anyone. I know what it can and can't do. It's been explored, pleasantly, sensually and in depth . I have been among the explorers. I look in a mirror and am met with instant recognition. I look at my face, unlined and unwrinkled and thank heaven for Grandma Irene's good genes. I look at my scars, trace them with my fingers and remember the reasons life carved itself onto my body. I look at my breasts, once so pitifully small compared to what I saw in movies and television, now lush, beautifully formed and a truly individual mark of my own womanhood. I see the "pooch" left behind from the last c-section and let vanity pervade my sensibility and wish I had money to have it removed. I look at softened planes once taut, I look at curves more generous than they once were. I look at creases and crevices, hills and valleys, folds, mounds and special places....my personal topography. I love my body ...every last inch of it....pooch and all.
So it is for my daughter, for your daughters and for any woman at odds with her physical form that I say this. Love your body. If you find something you want to alter then do so if it makes you happy, if it makes you healthy, but never do it to make someone else happy. Don't discount it's form because of something you might see in a print add, in a film or on television. Computers enhance images and they are unrecognizable even to the subject themselves sometimes.
Love the vessel that was given you to traverse this lifetime. Honor it, respect it and revere it. It is you in the truest sense and there is not another just like yours on the entire planet.
That in itself is cause for celebration!
Indeed.
It has taken me a very long time to love my own body. God blessed me with a pretty decent model and early on I had some knowledge of how attractive I was to others. I didn't appreciate the strength in having that knowledge, in fact it irritated me. I thought it a shallow quality, one I was gifted and hadn't earned. I was more about substance and intelligence than physical attributes. I wanted to be taken seriously and not patronized. How easy that notion is to embrace when one is nice looking and suffers no poor images of ones own body.
I watch my stunningly beautiful daughter struggle with hers. She's twenty five years old, educated, professionally successful and drop dead gorgeous. She's reed thin, she has waist length silky blonde hair and a 100 watt smile. She's funny, she's sweet and she can tell you off in the blink of an eye. I can't believe I gave birth to this wondrous creature. It pains me to watch her displeasure with herself...but I know, like me, she will get to that place where she loves her body in time.
The place I am now.
I love my body. I know it better than anyone. I know what it can and can't do. It's been explored, pleasantly, sensually and in depth . I have been among the explorers. I look in a mirror and am met with instant recognition. I look at my face, unlined and unwrinkled and thank heaven for Grandma Irene's good genes. I look at my scars, trace them with my fingers and remember the reasons life carved itself onto my body. I look at my breasts, once so pitifully small compared to what I saw in movies and television, now lush, beautifully formed and a truly individual mark of my own womanhood. I see the "pooch" left behind from the last c-section and let vanity pervade my sensibility and wish I had money to have it removed. I look at softened planes once taut, I look at curves more generous than they once were. I look at creases and crevices, hills and valleys, folds, mounds and special places....my personal topography. I love my body ...every last inch of it....pooch and all.
So it is for my daughter, for your daughters and for any woman at odds with her physical form that I say this. Love your body. If you find something you want to alter then do so if it makes you happy, if it makes you healthy, but never do it to make someone else happy. Don't discount it's form because of something you might see in a print add, in a film or on television. Computers enhance images and they are unrecognizable even to the subject themselves sometimes.
Love the vessel that was given you to traverse this lifetime. Honor it, respect it and revere it. It is you in the truest sense and there is not another just like yours on the entire planet.
That in itself is cause for celebration!
Indeed.
2 comments:
There are times when it is hard to be forgiving of a body that has drifted too far, especially when it fails to heed any call to return to a form you preferred. I've watched a very dear friend suffer from this. I am sure if all other facets of life were just tickerty boo then the body would be forgiven, and then the happier whole would naturally drift back to a better version.
And it's not just a female thing. I've never really noticed being noticed, but a few conversations when I was younger made it obvious I had been favourably been noticed. I remember one conversation where, in front of a dozen girls at the refectory table, I confessed being frustrated by not having found a girl, they all looked at me and started saying how they assumed I was already spoken for, because of my look and my manner. Another time I was talking to a couple of female friends when I'd just landed a girl friend and expressed surprise at how I could be deemed attractive, and the two of them just started listing attributes that I never really noticed.
Now I carry a little too much weight. I don't think my look worries me, the excess all seems to be packaged neatly between belt and chest, not really on my neck or face. What I don't like is how I have slowed, and can't seem to find time to get my pace back to where it was, knowing that even modest activity would get me back to where I was.
Love my body? It's served me well so far, only let me down a few times with illness and allergies. It is a comfortable home, but since I live in my mind more than my body, and I live between trees and flowers on one side and great architecture on the other I seldom look at bodies.
Yes I do appreciate other peoples bodies from time to time. In a clothed world I tend to notice faces most; everything else well I know the clothing is lying about that, accentuating or hiding curves that "should" or "shouldn't" be.
I have found a forum which displays people of all "pleasant" sizes and shapes. Not just the stereotype, but a generous lattitude of forms. I wonder when such forums will embrace everyone, while at the same time airbrushing has been replaced by Photoshopping, and at times 100% CGI, has replaced any naturalness with ideals.
I like the random shapes of fruit from a tree more so than the repeated shop fruits.
"I am sure if all other facets of life were just tickerty boo then the body would be forgiven"
I loved that line!
Mrs P
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